September 1, 1939
In an earlier post today, commenter “PA Cat” writes this:
Today marks the 84th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland that is usually considered the beginning of WWII. I went back to look at a poem by W.H. Auden associated with that date, namely “September 1, 1939.” The first stanza reads as follows:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.The poem is interesting for several reasons, one being its revival following 9/11. As Ian Sansom notes, ” . . . in the aftermath of 9/11, many American newspapers reprinted Auden’s poem in its entirety: it was widely circulated and discussed online and in print. It seemed prophetic, wise and relevant, almost too good to be true. This is partly because it mentions September and New York, circulating fears, and the unmentionable odour of death, all in its first stanza. It was the right poem, in the right place, for a wrong time.”
The other reason why the poem is interesting is that Auden later disowned it, stating that “The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.” He refused to have it included in anthologies of his poetry, but readers have persisted in reviving the poem again and again. Sansom goes on to describe “September 1, 1939” as “the world’s greatest zombie poem. It won’t die – and never will – because people want it to be true. . . .
Later in the thread, commenter “IrishOtter49” asks a good question: “Why did Auden dislike his own poem?”
I recall reading about that once, and although I can’t find the essay where I found it, I located this, which is in agreement with what I recall:
… [P]erhaps Auden wouldn’t be surprised that “September 1, 1939,” a poem he essentially disowned, is one of his best remembered. Penned to mark the outbreak of World War II, the poem had a renewed profile after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Auden came to dislike “September 1, 1939,” especially its much-quoted assertion, “We must love one another or die.” The line later seemed nonsensical to him, since people must ultimately die regardless of their actions.
The line that is probably best remembered is the one Auden disliked the most, perhaps for reasons having to do with logic – we all die anyway – but I believe he also may have found it somewhat trite and pat. I’m guessing at that part. I think he was too hard on himself about this, because if the line is interpreted as referring to humanity as a whole rather than the individual, it’s dealing with something different: can humans survive without love, or will hatred take over and destroy us?
In this, the line is a bit like the famous – and often-reviled or mocked – state motto of New Hampshire, “Live Free or Die.” Yes, we die either way, free or in slavery. But the motto is saying that the speaker chooses freedom over fear of death, and is willing to die for freedom. That’s a different message than in Auden’s poem, which I’m pretty sure is not saying that we should be willing to die for love. But “or die” is a way of saying something else, even though “or” is not really a choice for humans about dying; it’s always “and.” Part of the question is also, “how we will live and how will we die, and when?” as well as “how many of us will die for lack of this precious thing?”
Auden may have had a more personal reason to dislike his poem as well, although this is just another guess on my part. Note that the poem’s narrator is placed in New York. Auden was British, but he had moved to America in 1939. From the link:
Others couldn’t help noticing that his departure coincided with the start of Britain’s ordeal in World War II. Novelist Evelyn Waugh would later claim that Auden had left “at the first squeak of an air-raid warning.”
His absence from England even came up in the British Parliament, although the government took no action against him. “In Britain,” says Carpenter, “some of those left-wing intellectuals who had supported and admired Auden during the 1930s were beginning to be shocked by his decision to remain in America.”
Auden, Carpenter concludes, “does not seem to have faced the question whether he had a moral duty to help, however trivially, in the fight against Hitler.”
“In Auden’s case,” Smith writes of Auden’s move to America, “it was probably not cowardice: Those who knew him are firm in their rejection of that charge.”
That entire era, and the controversy of his move, might not have created the most pleasant memories in Auden. At any rate, the poet doesn’t own his own poem. The world is free to make what it will of it, and the world’s verdict is that it is good.
My favorite part has never been that line. It’s the last stanza:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
And in the non-poetry realm, on Hitler’s invasion of Poland:
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany. The SS, in collusion with the German military, staged a phony attack on a German radio station. The Germans falsely accused the Poles of this attack. Hitler then used the action to launch a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland.
And a couple of weeks later, the Soviets came in from the east in accord with Hitler and Stalin’s pact.
Switching back to poetry and the subject of love, Edna St. Vincent Millay has something to say on a personal level. I’ll let her have the last word:
“Why did Auden dislike his own poem?”
Thank you for addressing this comment, and addressing it well. It’s the comment I searched those following in hopes of a reply. And thank you for all the things you do, including handling American Digest.
Neo–
I just posted a reply to IrishOtter49’s question on the open thread– the online source I cited is here:
https://thelondonmagazine.org/article/w-h-auden-and-september-1-1939/
It’s another addition to the discussion, and I hope it helps.
Richard Wilbur thought Auden was pretty good too. Here’s his poem “For W. H. Auden”:
Now I am surer where they were going.
The brakie loping the tops of the moving freight,
The beautiful girls in their outboard, waving to someone
As the stern dug in and the wake pleated the water.
The uniformed children led by a nun
Through the terminal’s uproar, the clew-drawn scholar descending
The cast-iron stair of the stacks, shuffling his papers,
The Indians, two to a blanket, passing in darkness,
Also the German prisoner switching
His dusty neck as the truck backfired and started—
Of all these noted in stride and detained in memory
I now know better that they were going to die,
Since you, who sustained the civil tongue
In a scattering time, and were poet of all our cities,
Have for all your clever difference quietly left us,
As we might have known that you would, by that common door.
The last two stanzas always get me. Wilbur exited “by that common door” in late 2017. I saw his gravestone waiting on a plinth in a memorial yard in Amherst, Massachusetts a year or so later, having just arranged for my mother’s stone from the same yard. The yard was waiting for the snow to clear so that Wilbur’s stone could be transported to the small country cemetery in the hills where he and his wife are buried.
Novelist Evelyn Waugh would later claim that Auden had left “at the first squeak of an air-raid warning.”
_______
Waugh was not speaking specifically of Auden there, (“Two Unquiet Lives”) but of the leftwing literary gang who rose to prominence in the late 30s. The article is specifically about Stephen Spender, though Auden and Isherwood are also cited.
It is really a great takedown of Spender. (The 1st half is, the 2nd half being about another book.)
Just yesterday received some old family photos. One of a newly enlisted happy teen-aged Marine.
Another photo of same Marine with his mom and dad and brother two years later after combat is an entirely different person. Like thousands of others who fought in the Pacific, he had a Purple Heart and a few other medals .Attempting to smile like the rest, but a noticeable hardness and seriousness.
He ended up very successful and normal. As a child I asked him what it was like in the war.He simply said: “War is Hell”.And, he meant it.
I just returned from a trip where, against the colorful beauty of old world Medieval architecture, I saw the zeppelin airfield (the ruins of the famous Parade Grounds from Hitler’s Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s ground-breaking 1934 propaganda documentary, and Courtroom 600 in the Nuremburg Palace of Justice, and, most poignantly, the Terazin Jewish concentration camp in the Czech Republic. The evil lurks in those places still, a black pall. The banal, utilitarian brutishness of Terazin made me quietly furious as we heard the backstory of the procedures of this miserable place, and the implacably diabolical outcomes.
I apologize for intruding again. A good friend of mine is a neurosurgeon who was born to Jewish parents on September 1, 1939 in Poland. His parents made it out to France and survived the war along with two more children, one of whom is also a neurosurgeon. They eventually made it to the US. I did not ask them how. The older brother trained at U of Michigan, which has an excellent program. The younger trained at Johns Hopkins. When the older brother was in the USAF, he was the neurosurgeon for all US forces in Europe. He decided that he wanted to see his birthplace in Poland even though it was the height of the Cold War (1972). He traveled to Austria and told a US consular officer that he was a student and had lost his passport. He got a new civilian passport and traveled to Poland where saw his birthplace. At the time he was a Lt Colonel in the USAF so it was a huge risk. Still he got away with it. Quite a guy. And a superb neurosurgeon.
And yet…Spender DID stay in Britain and joined—IIRC—the volunteer fire brigade in London during the war.
So he WAS in the thick of it… (He also married, which may well have been his own personal version of “Good-Bye to All That”…)
Meanwhile, Auden and Isherwood made THEIR choices….
…but since Auden is a giant, should he be cut some slack?